HR Tech trends often ignored by HR

HR Trend Workshops

In the last year, I conducted many workshops with HR teams focused on the current HR trends. I was fortunate to meet many ambitious HR teams, often of multinational organisations. A typical flow of a workshop is as follows:

I give an overview of the current trends

The participants complete the HR Trend Scan

We review the HR strategy/ plan of the organisation, and consider how the HR trends can be used to accelerate implementation and increase the impact of the most urgent HR projects.

Overview of HR trends

As a starting point, we use the nine trends as outlined in the picture above. Generally, people are aware of the trends. It becomes more interesting, if we show examples of how innovative organisations and solution providers are using the trends.

The HR Trend Scan

In the HR Trend scan the participants are asked to answer the following question for each of the nine trend areas: “To what extend is your organisation adapting to the trend [from hierarchy to network/ the invasion of smart tech and so on]”.

The rating scale used is:

0 = No, we are kind of ignoring the trend
1= Yes, we are doing what others are doing
2= We are innovating
3= We are trend setters
4= We are far ahead!

The outcomes of the HR Trend Scan

In a very crude and unscientific way, we summarised all the outcomes of the HR Trend Scans we conducted in 2017 in two pictures.

In picture 1: the average score on the 5-point scale (0-4) on each of the nine trend areas. Lowest score for “The invasion of smart tech”, highest score for “Purpose before Pecunia”. Overall there seems to be a lot of room to better adapt to the trends.

HR Tech trends often ignored

In the second picture the average percentage of people that answered the questions with the answer “No, we are kind of ignoring the trend”.
Highest on the list of ignored trends: “The invasion of smart tech” and ‘Making fun is serious business”.
Difficult to extrapolate these results to other organisations, but they might be considered an indication where HR stands today. The clients of the HR Trend Institute are not a random sample. Most clients are organisations that realise that it helps to look for inspiration outside.

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Tom Haak is the founder and director of The HR Trend Institute. Prior to founding the HR Trend Institute in 2014, Tom held senior HR positions in companies as Arcadis, Aon, KPMG and Philips. The HR Trend Institute detects, follows and encourages smart and creative use of trends in the field of people and organizations, and also in adjacent areas.